Russia's deputy Prime Minister insists that the FEDOR Robot, which has been trained to fire handguns, is not a Terminator.

Footage (to the right) of Russia's FEDOR (Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research) robot firing handguns at a target board has sparked concerns that the country is building some sort of Terminator army, but deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin insists that this isn't the case.

"We are not creating a Terminator, but artificial intelligence that will be of great practical significance in various fields," Tweeted the PM. FEDOR is supposedly being developed for Russia's space program, and is expected to be sent into space in 2021. It's a highly intelligent machine with very advanced motor skills - It knows how to use keys and a variety of tools, screw in light bulbs and even drive a car.

The robot was originally created for rescue work but Russia now believes it is the future of space travel, and may eliminate the need for human astronauts altogether in future missions.

If your name is Sarah Connor, however, you may want to just go ahead and remove your name from the phone book. Just in case.

The Russians really have a thing for AI systems, whether it's slaved fire control on jet fighters or a space shuttle that could take off, orbit and land entirely on automated internal guidance (in 1988!), they've somehow been streets ahead of the rest of the world with this one specific thing.

We can only hope the Terminatskis are as disorganised and corrupt as everything else Russia does, they'll be too busy bootlegging battery acid to lost Tesla drivers to actually do any exterminating.

It really was only a matter of time. I mean, we already have machines that can fire guns. Now were just making them more human-like. Death is coming eventually, because I doubt AI and robots are going to put up with all the crap that humans do.

Because it's AI controlled? Specifically programming a shooting and aiming routine isn't the goal, rather than letting it figure it out itself. With machine learning, we can basically set a goal of "get hits closest to bulls eye", and let the machine figure out the rest via trial and error. There's no point in hard programming shooting mechanics for this space-faring robot, but letting it learn how to perform a task like shooting is a simple benchmark for future advances and it's control of fine motorics.

What is the deal with the brass falling at the end. That was obviously staged, which casts doubt on the whole thing. Next thing they are going to tell us they have downloaded a digital copy of Putin's brain into it, and they will be displaying the robot bear being developed for it to ride into space.

That's particularly inefficient design. Why not design a killbot with built in guns (in the chest or head)... and hands that could choke humans in melee distance. And why not more arms, if it is going to be holding guns wouldn't holding a half dozen be better than 2, with some more arms and hands left over for the choking. There's really no benefit in designing a humanoid form for a killbot. Evolution guided our forms to bipedal humanoid... and evolution is a chump compared to what we can design in an actual killing machine. Remember robot wars, the first season or whatever there were fire spitting bots and complicated spinning blades and hammers and such... and it was all useless compared to the rolling wedge that could just knock all those others over. The perfect killbot would be just the phantasam ball with a spike on it. Just flies around and stabs meatbags. Small target profile, difficult to shoot or disable... very simple programming 10 fly around 20 stab anything human shaped and/or temperature, goto 10.

What did you guys expect? Warfare has always used the best toys against the opposing sides, from the Redcoats using Pompom Maxim guns vs. foes that made it look like combat in a Civilisation game, up to wire controlled drone tanks in WW2 (Goliath Tank and it's odd predecessors) up to drones, computerized tanks, satelite guidet artillery systems and well, nowadays laser weapons (anti missile) and apparently infantry robots soon to come.

Kyrian007:That's particularly inefficient design. Why not design a killbot with built in guns (in the chest or head)... and hands that could choke humans in melee distance. And why not more arms, if it is going to be holding guns wouldn't holding a half dozen be better than 2, with some more arms and hands left over for the choking. There's really no benefit in designing a humanoid form for a killbot. Evolution guided our forms to bipedal humanoid... and evolution is a chump compared to what we can design in an actual killing machine. Remember robot wars, the first season or whatever there were fire spitting bots and complicated spinning blades and hammers and such... and it was all useless compared to the rolling wedge that could just knock all those others over. The perfect killbot would be just the phantasam ball with a spike on it. Just flies around and stabs meatbags. Small target profile, difficult to shoot or disable... very simple programming 10 fly around 20 stab anything human shaped and/or temperature, goto 10.

More or less, though if it has to use things designed for humans, not killbots (which most things are going to be for quite a while), a human shape will help. Being stuck with legacy systems is annoying, yeah.

I mean, if it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, then it is probably a duck...

Either way, Im sure if someone wanted to make a gun robot, giving it wibbly wobbly legs is probably not the most efficient option. That being said, that is a robot with a gun, and I just don't know how to really feel about that.

terminators aren't even economically viable It wouldn't make sense to use the,fucking drones are scarier shit and that stuff doesn't have to unmanned, are reasonably easier to produce, distribute and generally harder to shoot down.As it stands it's a fucking waste to build a robot that shoots guns when you could just pay people to pilot drones.

cleric of the order:terminators aren't even economically viable It wouldn't make sense to use the,fucking drones are scarier shit and that stuff doesn't have to unmanned, are reasonably easier to produce, distribute and generally harder to shoot down.As it stands it's a fucking waste to build a robot that shoots guns when you could just pay people to pilot drones.

Simply untrue. If there's one thing the modern military approach to foreign warfare has proven us is that air superiority is woefully inefficient at keeping order on land. Good at blowing shit up though.

Simply untrue. If there's one thing the modern military approach to foreign warfare has proven us is that air superiority is woefully inefficient at keeping order on land. Good at blowing shit up though.

One that can be handled by regulars if you actually want to hold ground, robots will never be ass effective and with the current world's population the components of a soldier is cheaper than a terminatorregardlessthis exists we will see a greater blurring of these sort of drone to highly mobile airodrones

Blitsie:Hahaha of course! And they're just making it good at shooting stuff in case it runs into any aliens out in space there right?

Honestly all I can say about AI at the moment is that Nier Automata fucking scarred me, they should play it hahahaha

Yeah this is exactly what I was thinking. Bit odd for a supposed space program to suddenly be interested in playing Robo-Rambo.

Exactly! While I can't say what their ultimate agenda is with this thing, they definitely made a robot that can shoot because they wanted to make a robot that can shoot, the whole space thing is most definitely an excuse. Or maybe even a half-truth.